Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

In March 2021, the WA Premier Mark McGowan and his Labor government were rewarded with a thumping majority, based largely on their perceived handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The line 'Mark McGowan kept me safe from COVID' rang out like political gold across Western Australia. While the McGowan government may have handled aspects of the pandemic well, it has also used it as a political shield to hide its incompetence elsewhere.

More people deserve to know the truth about the underperformance of the McGowan Labor government. Public sector wage rises have been capped at $1,000 a year since 2017, supposedly so the government could undertake budget repair. Now, with a $6 billion surplus, it's not unreasonable that nurses and midwives, among others, are asking for their fair share. In recent days, we've seen images of nurses striking because of the McGowan government's bungled wage negotiations. How did Mark McGowan respond to 3,000 striking nurses? He arrogantly declared on Friday that their actions were 'totally and utterly outrageous'. Compare this to 2013, when the Barnett Liberal government listened to the concerns of nurses and signed an agreement to provide wage increases. At the time, Premier Barnett said:

When you are faced, as a Premier, with clear professional advice that lives could be lost—and they probably would be—I think I had a responsibility to act on that.

Those were the words of the former Liberal Premier Colin Barnett. Mark McGowan's responsibility is no less, but he has just failed it.

It's the same story with ambulance ramping. Under McGowan and his now health minister, Amber-Jade Sanderson, ambulances in Western Australia have spent more than 54,000 hours ramped outside state hospitals this year, a dramatic increase from just 25,902 hours in 2021. Labor's response has been to blame St John Ambulance and the ambos in a pathetic refusal to accept accountability. It's no overstatement that the McGowan government has generated a health crisis—a health crisis that is of its own making. They have had more than 500 hospital code yellows this year alone. The worst impacted was Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, which went into code yellow 144 times in 2021-22—an average of once every 2½ days. The Australian Medical Association (WA) president, Mark Duncan-Smith, described code yellows as 'nearly unheard of' when he was a junior doctor. These incidents are a direct consequence of the McGowan Labor government running the medical system into the ground over the last five years due to blatantly underfunding health services.

WA Labor hasn't fared any better when it comes to law and order. The state's crime severity score has risen in seven offence categories, including abduction, harassment, sexual offences and acts intended to cause injury. Premier McGowan has said:

I take responsibility for these things, we are going to ensure we continue to roll-out additional police officers in the city and regional WA.

So said the Labor Premier Mark McGowan. But this financial year 340 police officers left the WA police service, with 60 departing in June this year alone. Labor simply isn't working for WA.

The Premier has also made a hash of WA's transition to renewables. Power outages have become a regular part of WA life. Energy minister Bill Johnston, or 'Blackout Bill', as he's known in Western Australia, is begging Western Australians via text not to use energy after a series of outages last summer.